


Blue Night: The Histories

by TheShantorian



Series: The Daylight Cycle [3]
Category: SHINee
Genre: Anger, Angst??, Backstory, Blue Night, Emotions, Epilogue, Flashbacks, Grey Dawn, M/M, Memories, Multi, Prequel, Romance, SHINee - Freeform, Sort Of, kpop, lots of feelings, the daylight cycle, zion t - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 15:42:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12634125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheShantorian/pseuds/TheShantorian
Summary: A collection of moments, leading up to and following the events of Blue Night and Grey Dawn. The final work in The Daylight Cycle.





	Blue Night: The Histories

Chapter 1: Haesol

 

**I.**

I met him on a Thursday. 

Thursday November 17, 4:42 PM. 

I spent 22 minutes waiting for the girl behind the counter to process my order. She was taking a long time. She held onto the negatives I'd given her like they were a bag of worms. She looked too tired to be handling them, too tired to even be employed at all. I wondered if she’d gotten any sleep at all last night. I guess in that way we had something in common, at least if she’d spent her night like I’d spent mine.

Awake.

I didn’t feel it, though, the tiredness. Sleeping was cold, too absent of things for me to want to be in it. I was tired of disappearing into a state of nothingness. Tired. Too tired to sleep.

4:40 PM.

“Here, they’re done.” She reached over the counter, passing a thick paper packet into my palms. “Look ‘em over, see if they’re okay or whatever.”

She vanished behind the black curtain again, the one she’d taken my negatives into earlier.

4:41 PM.

I flipped open the packet, rifling through print after print like I was sifting through one of the library card catalogues. Nothing wrong. The prints were all clean. The dust-clogged bell above the door behind me clattered more than it chimed.

4:42 PM.

Packet in hand, I shook my head, my sunglasses falling over my eyes. The world blackened like it’d been stained by spilled coffee. I made for the door, only to slam straight into someone only about an inch shorter than I was. 

My forehead hit his, my sunglasses catching on something, his jacket collar maybe, before hitting the tiles our shadows occupied. The lense made a different sort of sound against the ceramic than the frames did. It’d cost more than I could earn in a month to replace the lense so soon after getting the pair. 

In my concern over my glasses, I failed to realize the absence from my hand, and the ocean of photographs that bled around my shoes.

I crouched down, not seeing him. My lense and the frames it should’ve been in found their way into my coat pocket, my fingers hovering over the photos. I didn’t know where to begin. They were all out of order.

The sound of him sliding his hands over my work, scooping the pieces closest to him into a pile in front of his sneakers was like sandpaper against chalk. My fingers curled inwards, taking hold of nothing.

I placed my hands on his. I think I might’ve been glaring. I wanted to be. Everything was ruined. 

His brows were relaxed. His lips in a straight, full line. He didn’t purse them. His eyes weren’t wide. His lids drooped like he’d just woken from a nap. 

I wanted to glare but I couldn’t anymore. 

“Sorry.” He didn’t look like he was.

I lifted my hand. “It’s okay.” It wasn’t.

A moment passed. He didn’t look away. I didn’t either.  It was a specific kind of silence, one where everything we didn’t say could be heard.

My mouth created words without direction from my mind. “They’re not in order.” 

I would’ve missed it if I’d looked away, but I didn’t, so I saw it: his brows rose for just a quick, fleeting second. An indication of concern. Guilt. Maybe I was searching for something that wasn’t there. 

And then his lips softened into something between a grimace and a smile, something that made me want to say sorry to him. 

“Tell me how they’re supposed to go. I’ll help.” He didn’t look away. I didn’t either. 

So I told him, and sooner than if I’d done it on my own, we were standing. The packet was in my backpack now. My fingers tapped my sunglasses’ remains like keys on a piano. 

He had the cash in his hand before I could come up with a good reason to refuse it. I tried anyway, using the flat of my hand to gently push his away. 

“Honestly, just take it.” He wasn’t giving in. “It was my fault.” His arms extended again, the bills in his grasp all I could see. 

I shook my head. “No, no, really, I’ll be fine.”

Neither of us moved for another moment, similar to the ones we shared only seconds before, but different because his shoulders now drooped with resignation.

His hand and the cash he held loosely in it vanished into the pocket of his coat. The determination in his eyes had disappeared too, to somewhere I wasn’t supposed to know about. 

“Give me your phone number then.” A black iPhone 4, a crack in one corner, filled the space where the cash used to be.

“What?” Within my pocket, my thumb glided across the edge of my dislodged lense. “Why?”

“So I can make it up to you.” He tapped the side of my wrist with the side of his hand. “If not for the glasses, for wasting your time.” 

“You didn’t.” The words were in the air, dissipating into our memories rather than contained within my mind, where I’d intended for them to stay.

Two taps on my wrist once again.

I took the phone from him, ignoring his fingers and how cold they felt. 

**II.**

His friends were close, more like a symbiotic organism rather than a group of five people. I felt like a parasite, intruding on something I shouldn’t, feeding off of their welcoming energy. He wanted me to fit in and so I tried to. I laughed when they did, I showed up at movie nights and brought snacks to Minho’s soccer games. I paid for drinks when the others were too drunk to understand what payment was.

It didn’t work. I couldn’t feel as at ease as he wanted me to. I think it might’ve been the timing, or maybe how suddenly I’d been thrown from my world into theirs.

He figured out my birthday without me telling him, probably from my Facebook account that I didn’t tell him I had. I couldn’t refuse the cash when he hid it behind a card from a dollar store, wishing me “many more happy years of friendship.” He seemed like the older one when he did things like that, keeping promises and making new ones.

I wore my new sunglasses to the surprise party I pretended not to know about when I got the job offer from National Geographic. I thought I’d be freelance forever. He didn’t think so. He’d started planning the party before I got the interview email.

It ended before I could process that it had begun. The people had vanished from my apartment, leaving me alone with him on my sofa, the scent of the crowd lingering like ghosts.

“Fuck.” He didn’t preface his statement, or add on to it.

The one sofa cushion between us seemed like an abyss.

“What?” My fingernail scraped some of the printed logo from my empty can of beer.

His face was propped up by his thin wrist, leaning on the armrest. His other hand gripped the fabric of the seat beneath him. “When are you leaving again?”

“Thursday.” The paint was building up underneath my nail. 

“Thursday,” he echoed. He glanced at me, just for a moment. 

I stared at the can like I hadn’t been looking at him for the past few moments of silence.

“It’s so soon,” he continued. The sofa creaked. I knew he was looking at me.

I faced him, hoping my expression was as unreadable as his. “I know.” 

He looked away.  I didn’t. 

His fingers wove together in the space between his knees, his elbows resting on his thighs. He opened his mouth momentarily, shutting it before opening it again. He did this a few times, his breath hitching as he chuckled softly.

“What is it?”

He shook his head. He still wasn’t looking at me. “I-- Just, I-- Nothing.”

“No, what is it?” 

“Nah.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” 

“...Okay.”

Someone had been wearing a lot of Axe. It was as if whoever they were hadn’t left.

“It’s like…” He curled one hand into his other, squeezing his fingers. “It’s like you just got here, you know?”

I stared at him. I rubbed a spot on my throat with my fingertips.

“I kinda…Nah, this is stupid.” He shook his head again, his eyes cast on his wrists.

“It’s not stupid,” I heard myself say.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

His eyes were shadowed by his hair, black and falling at his brows. “I kinda wish you weren’t going.” 

If I hadn’t already been breathing through my mouth, my lips would’ve parted. Something in my chest poured from where my heart was and pooled in my gut. I placed the beer can on the table in front of us.

If I had words I would’ve given them to him.

“But this is literally a once in a lifetime thing,” he told me and the ghosts, “I’d be fucking pissed if you didn’t go.” 

I think I knew, then. I think that was the moment. 

“You go, and you get rich, and you buy me a Lamborghini, okay?” His lips formed what was known as a smile. His eyes were empty. 

“What colour do you want it?” Those weren’t the words I had meant to give him.

‘I’m not leaving you,’ would’ve been closer to the truth.

**III.**

Unpredictable. Both him and his drinking habits. 

Sometimes he’d take videos or photos or both on the camera I bought him for Christmas, “recording” long after the battery had died. Sometimes he’d reminisce, memories and past pleasures spilling from both his eyes and his lips. Most times, he’d be silent, hunched over the bar or the table we sat at, a pen in hand as he scrawled out lines of poems and songs he’d never show me. He wrote them on napkins, sometimes on the backs of menus, pocketing what he could when he’d finished writing. 

He never got angry. If he did, he kept that side of himself from me. I felt safest around him, but I knew that sentiment wasn’t reciprocated. A one-sided shelter. 

He tapped his fingernails against the beer bottle, the sound muted by the moisture on the outside of the glass and the general loudness of the bar. He stared at it like it’d just told him he was stupid.

I made eye-contact with the bartender. Their eyes flickered to Jonghyun, brows pulling together. I did my best to appear apologetic. The bartender returned to tending the bar.

“Can I tell you something?”

For a moment I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined his voice, conjuring it from amongst the din.

“Yeah,” I told him. 

“How long has it been?” He turned his head towards me, staring in an off-kilter kind of way. He stopped tapping his bottle.

“How long has it been since…” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

“Since we met.”

526 days. It’s been 526 days.

“I don’t know,” I told him. 

“Hm.” He looked at the bottle. “This isn’t what I wanted to tell you.” He stopped, gripping the bottle now. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“You don’t even know why I’m sorry.”

He was right. “Yeah…”

I missed the exact moment when, but he was looking at me. “You’re a fucking dumbass.”

I saw the image of a sheet of tissue paper dissolving in a glass of water within my mind. A nonsensical thing. 

“What?” I wasn’t sure if I’d even spoken aloud.

“Why didn’t you go?” His voice cracked.

That’s what it was about. “Because you wanted me to stay.”

“So-fucking-what?” His tone became frantic. “Live your life, man.”

“I am.” 

“You’ll never get another chance like that!” 

“You don’t know that.” I did know that. 

He made a sound somewhere between a groan and a sigh. His eyes glittered like shattered glass as tears welled at his lower lashline. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” It felt like the right thing to say.

“Yeah I do.” He blinked a few times, the liquid glass streaking down his patchy, reddened cheeks. “I shouldn’t have said anything to you.”

I didn’t say anything, but he saw my confusion.

“The party, at your place. I shouldn’t have-- I should’ve just said I’d miss you.” His eyes remained focused on mine as he emptied the rest of his beer into his mouth. “That’s it.”

“I would’ve stayed anyway.” The words I spoke matched the ones I meant to keep from him.

“Why?”

“It just didn’t feel like the right fit for me.” Because he wasn’t completely happy. “I don’t think it was meant to be.” Not without his approval.

His eyes searched my face for some hole in my words, anything that would lead him to realize I was lying. I wasn’t, and he found nothing. He returned his attention to his now empty bottle.

Three songs I’d never heard before played over the speakers hidden high above us, in the ceiling of the room.

“What I actually wanted to tell you wasn’t about you,” he explained.

“What is it then?”

He hesitated. He’d been holding onto whatever it was longer than I’d known him.

“It’s Minho.”

“Minho?”

He didn’t look away from the bottle. “He’s not-- I-- He’s not a good person.” 

“He isn’t?” I wasn’t particularly close with any of the others aside from Jonghyun. I knew Minho and Taemin were in a seemingly happy relationship. I didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary with him.

“He isn’t. He doesn’t keep his word. He gets in the way when you tell him not to interfere. He lies. He’s a show-off. He’s not even exactly my friend anymore.” His words fell into our non-silence like he’d knocked over a mug.

My heart beat so violently I felt when my blood left and re-entered my fingertips.

“Don’t trust him, Haesol,” he cautioned. “He’s not what he seems. He let me down, really badly, and I can’t forgive him.” 

“What did he do?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking the same way I couldn’t slow down my heart. 

“He stole from me.” There was a solidity to his voice that hadn’t been there earlier. I wasn’t sure of how intoxicated he was anymore. “He promised he wouldn’t, but he did.”

My questions got tangled up behind my teeth, knotting there. I couldn’t ask a single one.

“Promise.”

“What?”

“Promise me you won’t trust him.”

“I won’t trust him.”

“You didn’t promise.”

“I promise. I swear.” No hesitation. There was nothing to hesitate over.

**IV.**

“Let’s hang out tonight.”

The white letters glowed against the black KakaoTalk background I’d chosen.

“Sure. Where & when?” 

“Carlo’s, 7? I wanna eat something cheesy.”

“Sounds good. See you there.”

That was six hours earlier. I got dressed from five until six. I wore black jeans that still had the tag on them when I pulled them from my drawer. My shirt, unworn, was a gift from a family member with more money than anyone needed to be comfortable. I chose a jacket I only wore to interviews or charity events, shoes I’d only used at a dinner party. I shaved, and combed my hair with a small amount of mousse. I had on the sunglasses he paid for, technically, and a flat-brimmed hat I usually wore at art galleries.

He was in jeans I’d seen a thousand times, sneakers with scuffs. His sweater was the one he’d had on when I saw him last week, the grey one with the small loop of wool coming undone at the bottom of the left sleeve. His coat was thin and I knew it had a hole in one of the pockets from when he’d let me borrow it. His hair was unwashed and askew, his eyes tired and as empty as my own.

“Trying to impress someone?” 

“Huh?” I meant to ask more than just that.

“You’re all dressed up.” When he smiled, a playful light illuminated within him.

“Not really,” I looked down at my clothes.

“You sure?” A burst of soft laughter replaced his emptiness, momentarily filling my own.

“Yeah, yeah, really. I just never get to wear this shirt.”

“If you say so.” He shrugged with one shoulder as he turned towards the restaurant's doorway. 

I followed him, the wind threading through my jacket, through my shirt. It gripped my skin. It made me wish I’d worn a sweater, too.  
  



End file.
